Talk:Stella Black
Would it be so much to ask for a few hints that would allow us to place their homeland as something a little narrower than Africa? I mean, their ethnicity and the fact that they speak of jungles and high humidity rule out the Sahara. The fact that they were very familiar with Islamic missionaries suggests they're somewhat north-ish, and this is borne up by the weather about which Blaise reminesces, which sounds equatorial. I suspect they're from somewhere toward the western end of the continent, if selling them to European slavers made sense, but not too near the coast, since Blaise had only seen one white man prior to his captors. That still leaves a tremendous amount of territory. Turtle Fan 01:59, 5 December 2008 (UTC) I was thinking--If the language she and Blaise speak at home has a written form, and if both of them happen to be literate therein (not the likeliest thing in the world, I suppose) and if she were willing to go to Honker's Mill and put herself at the Council's disposal as some sort of secretary, Atlantis would have a really first-rate system for "encoding" messages that are simply too sensitive to be allowed to fall into enemy hands. I wonder if that ever occurred to HT. I'm sure that if it did he decided it wouldn't've occurred to the white Atlantean powers that be. Turtle Fan 19:19, 5 December 2008 (UTC) :HT probably assumed racism would trump common sense. TR 19:21, 5 December 2008 (UTC) ::That, or he decided that making Stella literate would be too hard to believe. As a tribal woman, as a slave, and as the wife of a man of modest means who happens to be in the employ of a prominent figure, she's always been something of a dime-a-dozen mediocrity. Turtle Fan 19:33, 5 December 2008 (UTC) Stella or Maria According to this article, the woman Radcliff and Blaise encounter was named Maria. Is she meant to be the same character? Would she have changed her name? TR 20:03, 18 January 2009 (UTC) :Hmm--Strange. It never says flat-out that they were the same woman, but it seemed extraordinarily likely prior to noticing this: Liberated slave, spoke the same tribal language as Blaise--How many could there be? And Blaise certainly seemed to be hitting it off with "Maria." :I know I always say this, but--Inconsistencies? Turtle Fan 18:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC) ::Let's review the passages. The Maria person was quite the firebrand, squarely condemning everyone involved in slavery. Not sure if Stella is the same way. TR 19:12, 19 January 2009 (UTC) :::The woman was named Maria, but Blaise also said that her African name meant "little star", which in Latin is Stella. I remember thinking in OA that Stella would have been a more appropriate name for her. It could be explained that she rejected her slave name in favor of her (Latinized) birth name. Barrel Nagurski 01:12, May 28, 2011 (UTC) ::::I was just looking at the passage which Barrel pointed out 7 years ago, and I think it is reasonable to treat Maria and Stella as the same person.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 22:13, July 3, 2018 (UTC) :::::Since I did a round of in depth articles in the year after Barrel's post, I am confident they are not the same. Stella was from French Atlantis, Maria was from Spanish Atlantis. TR (talk) 04:03, July 4, 2018 (UTC)